Ironic how so many who say they worship Jesus as their Lord and Savior forget all that he taught:
If we have food and covering, with these we shall be content. But those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a snare and many foolish and harmful desires which plunge men into ruin and destruction.
I was watching a lecture on the 1914 Ludlow Massacre, where striking mine workers and their wives and children were attacked and murdered by National Guard soldiers and hired coal company thugs. Their tent village was burned and sacked at the wishes of the Rockefeller combine who owned the mines and related businesses. The mine owners disregarded the federal laws that protected mine workers. They also ignored the pleas of the workers for better pay and accommodations , which actually initiated the strikes in the first place. Here’s the skinny on all this: viewing Claude Berri’s 1993 film Germinal which related to the 1860s French mining workers’ strikes, John Sayles 1987 film Matewan about the 1920 coal miner’s strike in Matewan, West Virginia, and Barbara Kopple’s 1976 documentary Harlan County USA about the 1973 coal miners’ strike in Harlan, Kentucky, you see that nothing had changed.
And so it still is, to some extent, today. Yes, the owners of industry may not plan to kill their unhappy workers. They just continue with the practice of ‘ dead end ‘ salaries and terribly unsafe, even deadly working conditions. They just do whatever is possible to get most of the profits of labor for themselves and their investors. Obviously, this is why it is paramount to have strong unions, and not ones that succumb to the whims of the owners OR the Democratic Party ( because the other party is too fascistic to even consider). Sadly, less than 10% of the private sector workforce is even in a union! What is crucial is the need for what the old Industrial Workers of the World ( Wobblies) called for in 1905: ONE BIG UNION… PERIOD!! The Wobblies were destroyed for obvious reasons, capped when they came out against the US empire’s imperialist participation in the war in Europe ( WW1). Yet, the most mainstream union of the time, The American Federation of Labor, along with the two major political parties, made sure the Wobblie idea of one big union for ALL workers was dismissed and deleted from worker consciousness.
So, we have our current economic environment whereupon the majority of working stiffs are oblivious to the past. The Democratic Party gives us ‘ We feel your pain’ BS and keeps out of the way of the super rich ( where most of their donors reside). The Republicans pass laws to comfort the super rich owners of our empire, calling anyone who disagrees as a Marxist/Communist. The mainstream media does the bidding of the empire, as their salaries come from that source ( Duh, who owns the media?). When men like my dad made at most $10k a year in the early 1960s as a member of the corrupt Longshoremen’s union ( ILA) he still had better benefits than 90 % of today’s private sector workers. Look how feudal our society has become! Wake up working stiffs, and adopt the ideals of those Wobblies!
Philip A Farruggio is regular columnist on itstheempirestupid website. He is also frequently posted on Nation of Change and Countercurrents.. He is the son and grandson of Brooklyn NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, class of 1974. Since the 2000 election debacle Philip has written over 500 columns on the Military Industrial Empire and other facets of life in an upside down America. He is also host of the ‘ It’s the Empire… Stupid ‘ radio show, co produced by Chuck Gregory. Philip can be reached at [email protected].
